Why Fun

Think about the best work you’ve ever done. Chances are you weren’t grinding your way through it, you were absorbed, curious, maybe even a little smile on your face. Fun wasn’t a distraction from the work; it was the fuel that made real progress possible.

Fun is a performance advantage. It turns attention into focus, repetition into practice, and effort into something you’re willing to come back to again and again. When work is even a little bit fun, you don’t have to drag yourself over the starting line every time; momentum starts to pull you forward. If you care about doing great work, you have to care about fun.

Environment

When the people around you are supportive, open, playful, and ambitious, even hard problems feel like games. You’re more willing to take risks, experiment, and admit when you don’t know something, because the stakes feel like learning rather than judgment. A tense, negative environment does the opposite: even “interesting” tasks become heavy and draining.

Your physical space matters just as much. A team whiteboarding to solve a hard problem, a developer who codes to lo-fi beats, a writer who only works in cafés, a designer who needs natural light are performance optimizations. Small things like music, lighting, or a favorite drink nearby sound trivial, but they signal to your brain that this is a space where good things happen.

Feedback Signal

When something feels fun, it’s usually telling you that your strengths, values, and challenges are lining up. You’re using skills you care about, in a way that feels meaningful, at a difficulty level that stretches you just enough.

Pay close attention to what specifically feels fun for you. Is it solving tricky problems? Teaching others? Building something from scratch? Collaborating with others in real time? Quietly refining details? The clearer you are about your personal version of fun, the easier it is to choose projects, roles, and teams that bring out your best instead of draining you.

When something stops being fun, it’s often a clue: maybe you’ve outgrown the challenge, maybe the environment has become toxic, or maybe your values have shifted and the work no longer matches who you are.

Am I having Fun?

A useful question to keep asking yourself is: am I having fun right now? Your body usually answers before your mind does. The practice is simple observation, not judgment—just noticing what’s actually happening. When you’re engaged, time softens, you lean toward the work instead of away from it, and small annoyances fade into the background. When you’re not, you find yourself checking the clock, feeling a strange heaviness as every action takes more effort than it should, and your shoulders slowly climb toward your ears. These aren’t random sensations, they are feedback.

Many things in our modern world take us away from awareness of whether we are having fun. We numb ourselves by checking our phones, using drugs like alcohol, eating food, and other cheap forms of dopamine. Throughout your day, check in and ask yourself, am I having fun? Am I enjoying the work I am doing, the people I am around, and the life I am living?

Fun Questions

Reflection and journaling can be a way to see patterns of the work, people, activities, and environment you have fun in!

What were the last 3 times you had fun? Where were you? What were you doing? Was there music playing? Who were you with? What did you see?

What was a time you did not have fun? Are there any patterns? Did you have to be in the environment you did not have fun in?

Make Things Fun

You can’t make everything enjoyable, but you can inject playfulness into almost anything. Turn a repetitive task into a personal challenge: “Can I do this 10% better or faster than last time?” Pair up with someone you like and treat it as a chance to talk and learn. Connect the dull work to the larger purpose it serves so it feels less like punishment and more like preparation.

Designing your work around fun doesn’t mean avoiding hard things. It means deliberately combining difficulty with curiosity, people with good energy, and environments that support you. When you do that, effort stops feeling like grinding and starts feeling like investment. You’re tired at the end of the day, but it’s the satisfying tired that comes from doing something that felt alive.

The Fun Strategy

Fun isn’t a luxury; it’s the foundation of sustainable excellence. If you want to stick with hard things long enough to become great at them, you have to build in fun on purpose: through the work you choose, the people you keep close, and the places you show up to every day.

Start small. Pick one project, one relationship, or one corner of your environment and ask, “How could this be 10% more fun?” Then test it like any other experiment: tweak a variable, see how you feel, keep what works, discard what doesn’t. The question isn’t whether you can afford to have fun. It’s whether you can afford not to.

You only have one life. Let’s have some fun.